At present, the medical industry faces many problems, medical data security, patient privacy protection, medical data sharing and use, etc., reducing the efficiency of the medical industry, causing difficult problems such as medical treatment and expensive medical treatment. Due to its decentralized, transparent transaction, collective maintenance, and reliable database, the blockchain has a natural fit with the medical industry and can effectively solve the existing industry ailments. The cross-border combination of medical + blockchain has many highlights to look forward to!

Highlight 1: Electronic medical record

At present, the electronic medical record informationization is still at a low level, and medical institutions are faced with problems such as data leakage, data scalability, and data interoperability.

Because the medical records of the medical records are different in format, the user's health records and medical records cannot be interoperable among medical institutions, resulting in high information barriers for data usage. When users are in medical institutions for medical treatment, they cannot smoothly call their health records, medical records, and examination results, which will only lead to repeated diagnosis, excessive medical treatment, etc., resulting in waste of medical resources.

As the owner of their own health data, users can not smoothly call and process their own health data, their own interests are impaired, and the non-interoperability of information makes the intermediate links gain huge benefits, and it is difficult to shake in the short term.

Blockchain technology decentralizes medical data storage through distributed accounting. Each user has the right to dispose of personal health data, helping users to organize medical record data, and users can securely access their health records and electronic medical records anytime, anywhere. It can also be authorized to be called by the medical institution where it is located, to avoid over-diagnosis, delay in diagnosis, and so on.

In addition, users can authorize and exchange their own health information through blockchain technology, and organizations can reward users with cryptocurrency, etc. Blockchain technology helps stakeholders, including research institutions, medical institutions, and so on, to collaborate, manage, and share medical data while ensuring data integrity, protecting patient privacy, truly returning the ownership of the patient's health care information to the patient himself.

Highlight 2: Portable Service Network

Because the medical industry misuses a large amount of resources due to mismatches in supply demand, people pay high medical expenses, but they do not have the expectation of medical services. The traditional medical service methods are incompatible with the increasingly demanding personalized service needs of users.

Blockchain technology has the potential to build a shared platform, link more medical service providers, transform the traditional supply-driven model of medical care into a consumer demand-driven model, and spend a large amount of medical resources originally spent on treating diseases. Turning to health protection, the information provided by the service is more open, and the optimal allocation of medical and health service supply resources and demand resources is realized to meet the personalized diagnosis and treatment needs of users.

Highlight 3: Encrypting tokens

As we all know, cryptocurrency is one of the most mainstream applications of blockchain. Because of the decentralization of blockchain, the cryptocurrency has gradually attracted people's attention because of its lack of redundant links, transparent transactions, and record-free tampering.

In the combination of medical and blockchain, crypto tokens will also become a new bright spot. Blockchain can help the medical industry build a complete service network that links medical resource providers and consumers. In the closed-loop ecological network, the circulation of crypto tokens provides a more efficient and convenient payment method for all parties.

At the same time, encrypting tokens is also a good incentive. Consumers receive token rewards in the network by completing healthy behaviors and consumer behaviors, and motivating consumers to obtain good healthy behavior habits. For medical resource providers, providing quality medical services, you can get the corresponding token incentives, improve service quality, and reduce costs.

Highlight 4: Encrypted wallet

The interests of the medical industry are complex, and the most common medical institutions are the ones that pay the most relevant medical institutions. The existing medical insurance payment system has been questioned, with inefficiency and complicated processes.

The application of the encrypted wallet in the medical industry has also been expected by the public. In the future, the encrypted wallet can support the payment scenarios of hospitals, nursing providers, insurance companies, biotechnology companies, digital medical companies, value-added service providers and government agencies, which is equivalent to everyone's health trust account, integrates medical insurance payers, and completes the complicated process of payment, which is convenient for users to pay and obtain effective medical payment guarantee.

As it is based on open source software, open API and commodity hardware, Blockchain technology has several advantages for healthcare IT. The architecture for the technology has components that facilitates faster, seamless interoperability between systems. Other advantages include scalability according to demand, disaster recovery, data encryption and cryptography technologies and built-in fault tolerance — the perfect ingredients for an indelible healthcare IT experience.

Apart from this superior level of technical advantage, patients, healthcare providers and other related individuals in the field can choose from a varied range of application choices and select options that would conform to their specific requirements. This is done by allowing patients, researchers in the medical field and the other people involved in the health care community to access the same shared data source on a timely basis and cinch accurate and comprehensive data related to the patient’s health.

Information is collected from a wide variety of health data sources like mobile devices, patient’s wearables, documents, EMRs and so on. Through Blockchain, it is also possible to accommodate unforeseen data in the future, making these data structures flexible and extendable.

Here are the various applications of the technology in healthcare.

Medical Data Management

Medical data management is a major advantage of Blockchain technology. By enabling health IT systems with the technology, all the existing challenges that the healthcare industry like security, reliability, privacy and even data interoperability are met with, and rendered non-existent. It gives timely access to data that healthcare professionals can use to make crucial diagnosis and deliver appropriate treatments. In fact, healthcare data becomes more easily managed, while saving money for payers, patients and even the providers.

Everyone related to the patient-care community can have their own local copy of the dataset, and when one person wishes to make changes to the data, they will have to go through a series of cryptographic criteria to be eligible enough to make changes. Once the edits are made, it would be turned into a ‘block’, approved and locked in place. The other members in the community will have to approve of the changes before they can be turned into blocks.

If the changes are made in a patient’s health record, then the patient can gain complete control on who can make changes in the data. And he/she can monitor the edits made, such as new diagnosis, limit people who can see sensitive medical conditions like mental health data and other parameters (setting different parameters for different kinds of data).

Billing and Claims Management

Billing and Claims Management is a process through which filing and processing of medical claims related to patient diagnoses, treatments and medications is done. Many institutions have fallen victim to data breaches where patient files are compromised leading to medical insurance fraud, theft and larceny. Through Blockchain technology, it is possible to thwart a good majority of these instances simply because the technology itself hinges on complex successions of data transactions. Greater auditability and traceability would help increase trust in the process, not to speak of the safe and manageable revenue cycle management that companies can follow.

Medical Research

Snooping in medical research is a serious issue that can be controlled successfully through Blockchain technology. Collaboration between the researchers and research participants in various innovative fields is initiated successfully. And it can ignite techniques that will do away with traditional methods of research and clinical care. This is because Blockchain can let the researchers reach a considerable level of historicity and inviolability of data throughout the clinical process.

In the medical research field, the proof of date is the main requirement, so this technology is really bringing about a paradigm shift. Timestamp is the main feature of each transaction made through Blockchain, and this information will be publicly transparent. The core functionalities of the technology include traceability and historicity of data, and users possessing the time-stamped data will become its owners. Frauds and errors in the clinical trial records can be significantly reduced by adopting Blockchain-enabled, time-stamped immutable records of all the trials, experiments, protocols and results.

Data Security

With the Internet of Things, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and connected devices, security of systems is another major concern within the field of healthcare. But with every problem comes a solution, so you do have a solution with Blockchain. The technology helps you enjoy all the benefits of connected devices, while at the same time securing the data and keeping them private.

More and more electronic data is being scoured across the internet, and health data security must remain in the top position for all organizations. Verifying transactions by consensus of all the parties involved, and then validating them against an authoritative ledger of similar other events in the past is another major advantage of the technology.

Another advantage from the technology standpoint is that it is virtually impossible to change the data, and this is very, very good from the patient record standpoint. The fact is that you have multiple checkpoints, so the entire data filling and exchanging is done in ultimate secrecy, while patients have better control over them. They can even decide who has access to their records, and who can make changes to it.

Blockchain Answers for Healthcare Industry Challenges

There is no doubt that the blockchain revolution has made significant changes in the healthcare industry. Here are some ways in which it answers the challenges that the industry faced before the technology became so popular:

India, with the second largest population in the World, has very limited adoption of EHR/EMR - In public healthcare institutions, the usage of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is limited to billing and registration. The private sector has a limited form of EMR but it has not yet started the exchange of health information to improve quality of care.

While focusing on quality health care, the health care services make sure that the patient’s health management is given top priority. And all the federal regulations are not making things any easier because they have really put the pressure on the health sector to provide effective patient care. To make this an absolute reality, it is important to remove the middlemen dependency. This is where Blockchain comes into the picture.

In simple words, Blockchain is a distributed ledger that can keep track of the transactions happening in a number of machines. However, it doesn’t allow the retroactive alterations of records as it is. You will have to alter subsequent blocks to maintain unity in transactions. Through this technology, a number of people handling the records and a community of users will be controlling the data, constantly amending and updating them.

And the interesting bit is that the technology plays a vital role in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It influences a host of businesses and industries, and the healthcare industry is actually one of them. In this article, we will look at some of the benefits of Blockchain technology.

Gartner Company predicts that the total market value of blockchain technology may exceed US$176 billion by 2025 and then will surge to US$3,100 billion within five years. Considering the point-to-point trading capabilities of the blockchain, those growth forecasts point to a tremendous change in many industries, including the pharmaceutical industry.

A video that journalists interviewed with Merck's leaders at the SAP Global Technology Developers Conference in Las Vegas found out how the company took the lead in the field.

As the world's seventh-largest pharmaceutical company headquartered in New Jersey, USA, Merck must comply with the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) requirements for returning drug traceability and certification. The total value of their annual return of medicines is between $2 billion and $3 billion.

Paul Cocuzzo, executive director of Merck's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project integration and operations, said: "We have a legal obligation to interact with all of our supply chain trading partners in verifying and identifying Merck's products before reselling them. We are collaborating through blockchain-based proof of concept to achieve regulatory compliance and help fight counterfeit drugs."

Pharmaceuticals giant Merck is seeking a patent for a way to use blockchain in order to track goods as they move through the supply chain.

Published last Thursday and submitted in December 2016, the patent application outlines a method by which a blockchain could be used to store information about a physical object – in this case, a single product – and receive updates as it moves onward from its point of origin. That distributed network could then be used to store information verifying the authenticity of the item.

In other words, the main point here is anti-counterfeiting. Merck already maintains internal processes for eliminating fake goods that move through its systems, and the proposed patent seems as if it would fit into those wider efforts.

Merck notes in its filing that the technology "enables a secure, reliable storage of the reading results with very high data integrity, such that it is essentially impossible to manipulate or erase or otherwise taper [sic] with or lose such data, e.g. due to unintended or deliberate deletion or due to data corruption."

The pharmaceuticals firm goes on to explain:

"Furthermore, the stored information can be accessed wherever access to the blockchain is available. This allows for a safe and distributed storage and access to the stored reading results, e.g. for integrity verification purposes such as checking whether a supplier of a product being marked with a composite security marking, as described herein, was in fact the originator of the product, or not."

In the field of pharmaceutical supply chain, the application of blockchain technology has unlimited prospects, and its enormous potential will allow more companies to enter this field. It can also help companies cut costs, which is unmatched by other methods. By making use of the intangible properties inherent in blockchain technology to prevent counterfeit drugs, more progress will be made in saving lives.

Hi for one of my sub questions I'm trying to survey experts in the blockchain field to hear their opinion on this subquestion:
Do you think Blockchain can serve as a viable alternative to a currently paper based/undigitized registration system?
Any insight you can offer is greatly appreciated!